Sex, lies and videotape: Sienna Miller in Interview
Interview, Steve Buscemi's American remake of the late Theo Van Gogh's Dutch original, sees battle-hardened war correspondent Buscemi sent off to interview soap opera star Sienna Miller, an assignment he deems far beneath him. Despite their instantaneous dislike for one another, circumstances see to it that they end up spending the evening together back at her apartment. Various Pinterish power games, conquests and submissions ensue, during which one's never quite sure whether they're about to tear each other's throats out and leave each other for dead, or tear each other's clothes off and turn the place into some pan-sexual R&D lab.
I dream of interviews like that. Never happens, though, more's the pity.The days of PR people letting you meet some major monarch of the marquee under anything but the most controlled of circumstances are lost to history now. Time was, until the late-70s, when a star's agent or manager - never a publicist - would simply call up Esquire or Playboy, and say, "I can let you have three days in Hawaii with Steve McQueen". And it wasn't beyond the realm of possibility that you'd might find yourself a week later, at four in the morning on Oahu, drunkenly careening down some lava-floe in a beat-up pickup truck with four naked teenage girls bouncing around in the back screaming their heads off for more cocaine, and McQueen muttering, "Not a word about this to Ali, okay pardner?"
Or you'd get a gig following Lee Marvin or some other drunken war hero, and when you returned a week later, you'd need a month to get the gin out of your system, along with dim recollections of an eight-state binge with stops for marlin-fishing, wrought-iron blowtorch sculpture, terrifying Pacific war flashbacks related at four in the morning in an empty restaurant with the waiters too scared to evict their famous, intoxicated customer, and then waking up on an eastbound flight with no memory of boarding it. Back then you could go to any battlefield in Vietnam, and celebrity journalism offered equally foolish and life-threatening full access.
All gone, that sort of thing, sadly. Much like the Pentagon with war correspondents, the studios have honed things to such a degree that you're unlikely ever to encounter an interesting situation or hear an enlightening remark or a discouraging word from their charges. One or two of them - Jeff Bridges, William H Macy, Malcolm McDowell among them - can actually transcend all this bullshit, but these days you're more likely to have to wait in line in a soulless hotel anteroom, feeling like a client in a brothel, before being led into another room where the megastar awaits, looking to resume the analogy, like a harrowed hooker who's accidentally double-booked Fleet Week and the Republican Convention, and now has to pay the pimpish piper.
Don't raise this analogy with them, by the way. I've tried it for laffs. None have ever resulted.
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